Hi. It’s really nice to be here. I haven’t been here in more than twenty years. Antioch feels to me the way the world feels right now: it’s very lush and green and beautiful, shit is very hard, some buildings are closed, Bambi clearly lives on the grounds, and yet, things are running. Volunteers, skeleton crew: it is what we make it.
Being here made me think about some of the things Antioch gave me. One thing Antioch gave me was this incredibly, miraculously, heavily queer and trans space. A place to come out, and the space to figure it out. Queers, I feel about us the way I feel about really big tiger lilies with their black pollen dust, and those purple flowers that come out of the roughest cacti, and lava. We are so bright and feral, at our best, and our joy radiates out from those qualities. I still believe in us, I still love us. For Antioch to be a haven for us, in rural Ohio, was life changing.
The second thing Antioch gave me was that breakneck co-op schedule we all loved so much ☺ that insisted on learning and on doing. This is so important right now. In a time of fake news, we need to find our way back to experience mattering. If you have read about something, but have not done it, you don’t know how to do it. If you have an opinion, you are a pundit, a commentator. If you have experience, if you are willing to jump in, you can become a world shaper. Antioch really pushed me to try out community organizing. Turns out, it is a lot harder than it looks. ☺
Finally, Antioch taught me what a mentor and teacher who sees your best in you and expects nothing less can do for you. Suparna Bhaskaran, will you please stand up? This person made me a better writer, a better thinker, and taught me that when you look at the contradictions you do not compromise your values, you actually find the bigger truth. Thank you, Suparna.
Straight outta Antioch, I cut my teeth in the US South: doing popular education in the Smoky Mountains, organizing small town gay bars, building organizations with lofty goals of liberation. But, over the years I became, at times, more bureaucrat than freedom fighter. More schmoozer to rich donors than listening to people. More ego than I would have wanted to admit. And then this interesting thing happened. In my late 30’s I was dealt a wild trifecta of cards: a bitter public divorce, a toddler, ovarian cancer. For those not familiar with ovarian cancer, it has an 85% fatality rate. They just about kill you to keep you alive when they treat it with chemotherapy.
This is a combination of life factors that will bring one to one’s knees. Fortunately, for the spiritual work I had before me, one can see a lot from on one’s knees: it puts you plant level, it puts you toddler eye level, and it puts you ground level, where all of our ancestors once became the soil.
I had always had that writer inside me, that part that listens to the silence, and hears things. I am sure some of you in this room have that part of yourselves as well. I had started books before, psyched myself out with doubt and insecurity. But, that book I wrote, during cancer treatment, I wrote by kitchen lamp light, while my kid slept, often doped up on steroids or tramadol. And it was the truest thing I ever found inside.
A funny thing happened to me when I wrote that book, felt death near, and climbed out of chaos and loss. I think it is a common thing people experience in such circumstances. I really stopped giving a shit about a lot of things that didn’t matter. I started looking at who I really was, what I really wanted, what I really had to give, and I forgave myself the things I did not like about myself, and just by shedding the shame and looking at them, I started to be able to change them. And I began to live the life I dreamed, with whatever time I have left, with the people I wanted to live it with, and I had a second child, a wild idea that has turned out to be one of the best of my life. That “idea” is now currently two years old, at home in Phoenix with my partner: kinetic and curious and bossy and perfect.
It also changed profoundly how I saw social movements and our roles. I realized how much people like me had accidentally done to spread this false idea that organizers work as individuals or should be celebrities. That is not what the ancient craft of community organizing is about: it is a team sport, and it is a contact sport--we win or lose often based on how in touch we are, how close we are to that knee-level view that I had learned so well.
Even now, even now, I think much is possible if we get back down to the local level: listen where we are, build where we are, get off the death screens, break up with the robots.
Organizing and writing do not actually have a lot in common as crafts, but they do have this: you are never too young or too old to start either.
And now, friends, we are in a time that beckons us to marathons, not sprints, that asks us to keep trying whether we see hope or not, to try even--and particularly-- when we don’t get it right, to fail, fail again, try something new, to wake up, get grounded, and not give in to numbing out.
Every good writer says if you want to write, read. But be selective, read writers who are better than you every week, who have depth and insight, who write about shit that matters. But, beyond just that, know other writers. Know other writers who you find fascinating. Connect to other writers who have those same qualities as who you choose to read: depth, meaning, insight. Cross-pollinating with writers is to writing what group therapy is to individual counseling: which is to say it reminds you that you are not the only one with problems, and no one is really that special. ☺
As you may have already gathered, I really am only good at two things: writing and organizing. And organizing is the one of the two I actually think is most needed right now. Good community organizing is actually very, very difficult.
To unite a community to fight requires vigor, tenacity, emotional intelligence, a great great deal of patience and most of all love for the people you are organizing with. It is never done alone. Don’t organize people you don’t like, or cannot find compassion for. There are too many people in the world that need organizing. You do not have to agree with them all the time, but you cannot look down on them or hate them and still organize them.
The best organizers I have known, you will probably have never heard of, because advancing the lives and power of the people they organize is their priority.
Real organizing, that gets the goods, is never about fighting for one’s self or those exactly like you, which, of course, is exactly no one. ☺
This country is very far into its blood-stained greed fever dream. We see where the whims of the rich and the comfortable have taken us: they have left us empty, jaded, culpable, and terrified. It is our time to do the work that the late great Joanna Macy called the work that reconnects.
As for the apocalyptic times in which we live, I can tell you to do all the usual things people are saying right now: join a group, speak out, protest, start a group, run for something. And yes, yes to all those things. But, for god sakes, listen more than you talk, help more than you take, bring back the good old fashioned 1:1 meeting over coffee. Care about other people again. Find out how they are doing, how you can help ease their burden, and they likely will ease yours. People, all over the world right now, are so longing to be looked at in the eye, to be heard, to be cared about.
As the poet Andrea Gibson, who just died of ovarian cancer last week, said: “I want to die with stretch marks on my heart.” In their final months, they talked about their journey with this cancer as being one where they wanted to get intimate with the part of themselves that was, and is, eternal.
When we live for the eternal, organize for the eternal, and for each other, the quality of our action changes.
We hold death near, and when we do she shows us what patience is, she shows us what courage is, she shows us what truth is.
Then any action we take matters, not because it is on social media, or makes the news, or others see it, but because it is our true mark, our bullseye, it is our destiny, it is what we leave behind.
Now is a time to fight. please. do whatever you can, with the time you have. And do not let them make you believe it is futile. Or that you are not the right one to do it. Who. Are. They. To. Decide. What and Who We Live For. It is Our precious time, however much is left, and we can do with it what we wish.
Lastly, I just want to say I believe that the people we love shape us and make us. I want to thank my mom for teaching me to always speak up to injustice, and to take no shit. And for my father for making the idea and practice of servant leadership part of the ambient oxygen in the house I grew up in. And, to them both, of course, for all their many sacrifices so I could attend a private liberal arts college like Antioch, and for my best friend Roberto for loving me so unfailingly and patiently all these years. Thanks for being here guys.
And thank you all for being here too. And for loving this wild beautiful little experiment on this beautiful spot of earth in Ohio.